Red Hook (19 page)

A small woman plugged into a Discman she carried in one hand jiggled up and down to her music in front of a
grocery store on Van Brunt Street. I recognized her. She was the woman who had attacked Tolya outside the bar in Red Hook, the woman who had climbed on him like a cat and tried to gouge his eyes out.

She wasn't bad-looking, and she seemed sober this time, not drunk or high. She wore cut-off pink sweat pants, and a turquoise T-shirt with a picture of Jimi Hendrix on the front. She was twenty-five, maybe thirty, short, thick, sexy in an athletic way like a gymnast. Her black hair was tied up in a ponytail. She ran inside the store. I pulled up and waited.

A few people were on the street, going into the pub and towards a restaurant with some tables on the sidewalk. Two black women waited at the bus stop. There was no subway on this isolated peninsula.

My eyelids sank over my eyes while I waited outside the store. Worried the woman would get away, I finally got out of the car and went into the store where I stood, partly hidden behind the beer and soda. She was examining boxes of cookies. I watched her while she read the labels carefully.

Eventually, she picked a bunch of bananas out of a bin and gathered up some potatoes from another one, asked for a pack of cigarettes from the guy at the counter, exchanged gossip with him in Spanish, stopped to light one of her smokes and carried her groceries back out to the street.

For half a block I followed her on foot until we were clear of the shop and then I called out in Russian. She turned around. I could see she knew who I was. She tossed her smoke away and ground it out with her foot.

Close up, she was a pretty girl. I took out my own cigarettes and offered them to her, but she shook her head so I lit one for myself. I spoke in Russian to her, my father's Russian, formal, polite, respectful. I always imagined it was the way he had interrogated people, at least in the beginning. I asked what her name was.

“Rita,” she said.

“Just Rita?”

“Is not enough?”

“Can we talk?”

“Yes,” she said and I was pretty surprised she was so forthcoming, so ready to talk, especially since I knew she recognized me as the guy who had been with Tolya when she attacked him.

“Come home with me,” she said, and I gestured to my car, and we both got in, and she directed me a couple of blocks away to the housing projects.

The projects were at the front of Red Hook, away from the docks and closer to the highway. Surrounded by scruffy grass, some of the buildings were thirty, forty years old.

Rita looked at the pink plastic watch on her wrist. “I have to cook,” she said in English and I didn't understand what she meant, but she indicated a parking spot and we stopped, and I followed her out of the car and into the dank hallway of a building and up to the top floor.

I could have been in Moscow. The damp stink of the long hall, green paint on the walls, the cooking smells coming from other apartments, the sound of people
fighting, it was a long time since I'd been in a building like this. I wanted out.

Somewhere dogs were barking. They sounded like they were tied up, barking, whining, howling.

“I think they still fight dogs around here, you know? Cockfights, but also dogs. For money,” Rita said, stopped in front of a door, and unlocked it.

It was a small apartment. She said she shared it with a Mexican friend. In the living room was a couch, an armchair, and a table that was covered with a green and yellow flowered tablecloth. On the wall, on a shelf with a candle in a red glass jar, was a shrine to some Catholic saint. Next to it was a little Russian Orthodox icon and beside it a photograph of Stalin cut out of an old newspaper and framed behind glass. A bedroom was visible through an open door. A second door led to a kitchen where I followed Rita.

“Tamales,” she said, setting down her bag of groceries on a table that had one leg shorter than the others and was propped up with a few sticks of wood. “We cook for soccer games. Is big deal here, weekends, holidays, everyone playing football in park. Also, I make pelmeni.” Rita smiled, and put on some latex gloves and picked up the top of a large pot full of glass jars. She checked there was water in the pot then turned on the stove to boil the jars.

“Jars for borscht. I make real good borscht. One day I am queen of borscht.”

“What?”

She took off the gloves with a snap and put them on
the counter near the stove, and leaned against the window.

“So over by old warehouses, little businesses all over Red Hook, you know, people doing this, that, blowing glass, making pies, designing stuff, kites, one lady makes so beautiful kites, so I start business, too, pelmeni, borscht, my friend Cecilia says, OK, you help me make tamales, I help with borscht, we gonna sell fancy restaurants, food stores. We gonna be big. Fancy.” She giggled. “We already give down payment on warehouse space by Snapple plant.”

I said, “There's a lot of Russians around here now?”

“There's Russians everywhere,” she said. “I'm born in Brighton Beach, I go back to Russia until I'm twenty years, then come back. I find place in Brighton, then I lose, move to Flatbush and I lose, and I have no place to go, story of poor Russians, we move, we get fucked, so I meet Cecilia and she says I can share. She is alone like me. So I make tamales,” she said in Russian now and glanced up at the shrine. “Where you from?”

“Manhattan,” I said.

“I mean in Russia.”

“Moscow.”

“You speak nice,” she said, “I speak shitty both languages, I lost both, English, Russian, moving around. You want something? Tea? Soup? Please.”

I said I'd eat some of her borscht—I was starving— and she heated some up, put it in a bowl and carried it into the living room where we sat at the table. I ate. I asked about the icon on the living room wall.

“Yours?” I said.

“My friend she makes shrine to some saints, so I make icon. Everyone praying a lot around here, Americans like praying, so I pray also.”

“To Stalin?”

“I get from my father,” she said. “So I keep. You think Stalin was so bad? Plenty Russians in Brooklyn loving Stalin.” She looked at my bowl. “Good?”

“Great,” I said.

“So you are surprised I invite you to my place? You think I just ask like that? You think I don't remember that you are friends with fat Russian guy?” She smiled. “So is your friend, this fat Sverdloff bastard?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Which is why you are following me?”

“I wasn't following you. I saw you on the street.”

She snorted.

I said, “Why did you attack him?”

“Are you cop?”

“Yes.”

“Is OK,” she said. “I am not scared of police like other Russians. I didn't do nothing. You want to know why I attack him? If I tell you, maybe you keep him away from me, OK?”

“OK.”

Rita got up and went to a black wood cabinet with a glass front, squatted down in front of it, and extracted a bottle of vodka. She pulled off the foil around the neck and opened it, then produced a couple of glasses and held the bottle out towards me.

“Yes?”

“Sure.”

She poured the booze into the glasses, then sat on the couch. I went and sat next to her. Rita said, “I am very, very drunk that day, OK, so I feel bad after, but Sverdloff making trouble around here. Always here, always talking, always wanting to know, Red Hook this, Red Hook that, where can he buy property, what goes on. I meet him at soccer game, I see him at a bar, he makes nice, you know, also he buys my food, then he says I will invest in business. He promises but nothing happens.”

I drank my vodka.

“Not so many people speak Russian around here,” Rita said. “So first I help him. He pays me something, and I help him, I tell him what I hear, what I know, who has bids on spaces, how much, then I find out he wants to buy everything. He don't give no shit about people here, he wants to buy and make houses for rich people.”

“He does this stuff himself?”

“No. He has people. He has people, you know? He don't do small shit. Is like movie business, you know? He is Mr Nice Guy, helps everyone, gives money for everything, kids, schools, charity, artistic stuff. Not him. He does not get hands dirty. I moved enough,” Rita said. “You understand? I don't want to move no more. I keep this apartment.”

“Yeah, but I'm not sure he's interested in this apartment.”

She finished her drink and poured some more. “So is your friend?” she said. “Friend from long time?”

“What else?” I said. “I could give you some money for your business. If you want. I could make an investment.”

I took out my wallet and looked inside. I'd been to the bank. I had vacation money. I took a fifty and put it under the empty borscht bowl.

“I mean I like borscht.”

“Your mom made?”

“Sure,” I said and thought of my mother who never cooked if she didn't have to, who hated Russian food and dreamed only of a life in Paris that she would never have, who cut out pictures of France from magazines she bought on the black market when she had a little extra money.

From her stash of photographs, she pieced together a life of Parisian pleasure, of museums, and bookshops, and cafés and delicious food and wine. She never made it to France, but after we were kicked out of Moscow, when we went to Israel, a few times, on birthdays, my father took her to a French restaurant. She ate pâté and French bread and they drank wine. She saved the menus.

For a few seconds, I wasn't sure if Rita would take the money or throw me out, but she was a smart cookie. She did her primitive shtick, and I listened and smiled and we drank more vodka and cracked jokes in Russian and I complimented her on her soup again.

She pulled her legs up under her and sat cross-legged next to me, leaning forward. She gave off heat. I was wearing a T-shirt, it was warm in the apartment, no air con, and Rita reached over and touched the bare skin on my arm.

“OK,” she said. “If you want, you can invest in my company, so I tell you this friend of you is big creep and sometimes I see him with black man, they walk
and talk a lot by docks and sometimes they are arguing.”

“Which black man?”

“Mr Sid McKay.”

“You know him?”

“Everyone here knows,” she said. “Small place.”

“You liked him?”

“Sure,” she said.

“What else?” I said, but the front door flew open, and a tall skinny Hispanic woman burst in, followed by a pair of teenage girls, arms laden with shopping bags that sprouted ears of corn.

The two girls spread a plastic garbage bag on the floor, and began husking the corn; the corn silk piled up like shorn hair.

Rita got up. I suddenly wondered if she had spotted me first on the street, if she just wanted some money. She wrote down her phone number on a piece of paper and gave it to me.

At the door I said, “Did you know that Sid McKay was attacked?”

“Yes,” she said. “Everybody knows. He is dead?”

“Not yet.”

Not yet. Not yet, it went through my head, it kept time with the sound of my steps in the hallway outside Rita's door. I ran, the sound echoed in my head. I left the building; it was dark. Teenage boys loitered close by. Somewhere there was the sound of gunfire, or maybe just a car backfiring.

Hurry, I thought to myself, but where to? I should have been on the road to Maxine hours ago, but I had to
know about Tolya. When I got through to someone at his condo in Florida, the woman said she had no idea where the hell he was, no idea, and it sounded like a lie. Everything sounded like a lie. I ran for my car.

“He's dead,” Sonny said on the phone when I answered it from my car. “He's dead, man. They unplugged Sid, you knew that, and finally he went. He's dead. Someone beat him with the metal plank, and left him, and it took him days to die. You figure he didn't know? You figure he didn't feel anything once he went in the coma? Who the fuck knows? Maybe he was lying there and he knew it all. So here's a wackola thing, man, he had metal in his brain and he had wood splinters deep in his hands, go figure.” Sonny sounded sober. “Go have your honeymoon. I'm with this now.”

I felt lousy when I heard. I already knew Sid was finished, but you could hope. This was final. I felt lousy. I should have paid attention when Sid told me someone was looking for him and killed his half brother Earl by mistake, but who would mistake Earl, a homeless drunk in rags, for Sid? It still didn't compute.

I said to Sonny, “Where are you?”

“I'm at the hospital, where do you think? You said fucking help the guy, so I'm helping.”

“I'm on my way.”

“Don't. There's nothing you can do.”

“What kind of wood?”

It was the thing that had been lodged in the back of my mind, and now I had to yank it out and look at it. Did Sid kill Earl? It occurred to me now that this was how Sid knew about the wood plank, about Earl maybe being hit over the head before he went into the water. It was Sid who had called in the case. Would he do it if he really was the killer? Because he suddenly felt guilty? Because no one would suspect him anyhow? Because I wouldn't? Did Sid read me so well?

“Artie, you there, man?” Sonny was still on the phone.

“What kind of wood, Sonny?”

“What?”

“The splinters in Sid's fingers.”

“Fuck knows,” he said. “You having some thoughts about this?”

“It doesn't matter,” I said.

If it was Sid who killed Earl, what the hell difference did it make now? Earl was dead. Sid was dead. If I kept my mouth shut, the waters would close over it all. If it got out, it was all anyone would remember about Sid McKay, that he killed a homeless guy who was probably his half brother. I'd make sure Earl got a decent burial, like I had promised, and let it go. I'd let it go. Sonny was waiting on the other end of the phone.